Quotes by Activists - Page 8

Science may have found a cure for most evils but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all-the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Simone Weil
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.
Sonia Johnson
I'm tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. I'm going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices I'm going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block.
Joanne Woodward
I know that through the grace of God I am the founder of Manitoba.
Louis Riel
I suppose the half-breeds in Manitoba in 1870 did not fight for two hundred forty acres of land but it is to be understood there were two societies who treated together. One was small but in its smallness it had its rights. The other was great but in its greatness it had no greater rights than the rights of the small because the right is the same for everyone.
Louis Riel
I have learned not to worry about love but to honor its coming with all my heart.
Alice Walker
The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
A work of art has an author and yet when it is perfect it has something which is anonymous about it.
Simone Weil
A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.
Billie Jean King
If't were not for my cat and dog I think I could not live.
Ebenezer Elliott
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors and no slave who has not had a king among his.
Helen Keller
Pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil
I thank God for my handicaps for through them I have found myself my work and my God.
Helen Keller
This struggle of people against their conditions this is where you find the meaning in life.
Rose Chernin
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham smoky to the taste thick-skinned and tender inside.
Marge Piercy
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened vision cleared ambition inspired and success achieved.
Helen Keller
If you do things well do them better. Be daring be first be different be just.
Anita Roddick
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James Baldwin
You take people as far as they will go not as far as you would like them to go.
Jeannette Rankin
I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain.
Mahatma Gandhi
Woman must not accept she must challenge.
Margaret Sanger
Everything has its wonders even darkness and silence and I learn whatever state I may be in therein to be content.
Helen Keller
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.
Mahatma Gandhi
Although the world is full of suffering it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...
Jane Jacobs
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
Jane Jacobs
There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
Jane Jacobs
No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.
Jane Jacobs
Religion should be a basis for overcoming division, not for creating it.
Julia Suryakusuma
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilisation.
Mahatma Gandhi
Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.
Jane Jacobs
A polite enemy is just as difficult to discredit, as a rude friend is to protect.
Bryant McGill
A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature...
Rebecca Solnit
We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.
Cory Doctorow
They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.
James Baldwin
Stay in the middle of the bell-curve of social norms and follow along, or you will find out the about freedom you never had.
Bryant McGill
[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.
Jane Jacobs
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant McGill
We must dilute and disperse all forms of concentrated power that refuse to be accountable to majority wishes.
Bryant McGill
Often, then, the stories came pouring out, and often they were set before us slowly and quietly like tea. These slow stories were told with understatement that made my eyes and voice fill as I translated; for when people seem to have no emotion remaining for such stories, your own heart must supply it.
Daoud Hari
How then can the US society come to terms with its past? How can it acknowledge responsibility? The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation. Everyone and everything in the world is affected, for the most part negatively, by US dominance and intervention, often violently through direct military means or through proxies.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Ponzi schemes don’t trickle down, they siphon up.
Heather Marsh
We’re currently faced with two entirely different challenges – facing down Islamism and jihadism on the one hand, and advancing human rights and democratic culture on the other.
Maajid Nawaz
A voteless people is a hopeless people.
Amelia Boynton Robinson
Adoptee rights are everyone's rights, and they deserve to be protected.
DaShanne Stokes
Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.
Yuri Kochiyama
Wise Child: Why don't you beat me then?Juniper: I can't be bothered.
Monica Furlong
Countries, states, cities, corporations and laws are all words on paper.
Bryant McGill
An Atheist is a person who questions every kind of authority, and this is the thing that is important. Because if we can, without blinking an eye, question the ultimate authority, god - who must be obeyed, then we can question the authority of the state, we can question the authority of a university structure, we can question the authority of our employer, we can question anything. So I think the primary thing that an Atheist is, is a person who looks at an authoritarian idea, or an authority structure, and says to that authority structure: from whence do you derive your authority and why should I be obedient to you? It appears to me that if I have human intelligence that this is enough for me to try to challenge whatever you're doing.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Suffering should not define you as a woman! And just because you’re a man it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect you! HELP HER to remove the taboos and the loneliness surrounding this disease; be understanding, show empathy, and don’t accuse her of being sensitive, delicate, or overly dramatic – this is a big opportunity for you guys to show that you care and to be a real
Susan Sarandon
Love is a word, another kind of open.As the diamond comesinto a knot of flameI am Blackbecause I come from the earth's insidetake my word for jewelin the open light.
Audre Lorde
...so individuals have their flesh cut and pulled, surgery companies proclaim it as an empowering choice, and the stifling cultural ideals about women's appearance are left unscathed
Kat Banyard
We are becoming the men we wanted to marry
Gloria Steinem
It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.
Kathleen Hanna
Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.
Cherríe L. Moraga
What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women.
Angela Y. Davis
A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.
Cherríe L. Moraga